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Google As The Next Microsoft?
theodp writes "In this week's missive, Robert X. Cringely argues that Google is starting to look a bit like Microsoft. The search giant is learning too well from the master, says Cringely, noting that Google's launch of Goog-411 after taking a long look at investing in or acquiring Free411.com under an NDA is straight out of an old Microsoft playbook. Cringely goes on to note that Google has a problem with algorithmic optimization gone mad (seconded by Newsweek), which is wreaking havoc on some AdWords customers who may find themselves out of business before they can get Google to do the right thing. Cringely concedes that Google's inability to follow through because of IT failings may not have been learned from Microsoft — it may just be an inevitable part of having an IT monopoly."
Google has anything but a monopoly. The search business can easily go to an engine that performs better. Google has most of the market share because they are quite simply the best at performing searches.
Microsoft on the other hand plays in a completely different arena. Switching from one OS to another is nearly impossible for many users and at least difficult for most.
No, Google has a long way to go before they become anything like Microsoft, no matter what their tactics may appear like.
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
The founders of Google, when asked to comment about the rapid growth, actually stated, that they were unhappy with the control slipping out of their hands.
Also based on experiences of my friends being recruited to google, I must admit, it's a nightmarish process and HR staff is nowhere near the excellence of the engineers working there.
But I'd still say that comparison of Google and Microsoft is pointless beyond their sheer size.
M$ has been growing with finance in mind, asking for money where no one used to ask for it before (think software licenses, you pay for XBOX, the games and an account and in the corporate world the fees are even higher).
Google on the other hand tends to provide free service for things that used to be costly (email, data mining) and only asking money for the premium services.
So any comparison between the two is pointless.
Here are the things Google are missing to become like Microsoft:
1. Screwing customers
2. Forcing bad products on their customers
3. Participating in anticompetitive behaviour
4. Having a monopoly
5. Bribing their way through standardisation processes
6. Giving away pay-software to create vendor lock-in
7. Produce horrible DRM that only affects those who actually pay
8. Have a chair-throwing jackass as CEO
Google operates by simply focusing on being the best at what they offer. But they do not force vendor lockin, nor threaten or crush the competition. Infact, several of their strategic moves almost seem to encourage competitors. While yes, they do offer you a one-stop-shop in many ways, but they are not the only ones either. Yahoo, Ask, and even Microsoft all stand there, and Google knows this. But rather than pulling a Microsoft, and bullying themselves into dominance, Google consistantly strives to better itself, to win out by simply being the best at what it is.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
It doesn't matter how they got to their position in the search market. They can still be a monopoly in their current market position. There is no underlying requirement that one has to attain a monopoly in a bad way for it to be a monopoly. Further, it is irrelevant whether people use Google by choice or not. You're automatically coupling 'monopoly' with 'bad thing that only a bad company could do.'
Whether Google is a monopoly or not is up for discussion. But you're being blind to what it means and how a company gets to that position.
The moment Google tries to destroy free standards, destroy competition, and break the law regularly at will, let me know.
Until then, can we please stop with all this hyperbole and nonsense about how Google is evil?
Last I checked, MSN and Yahoo both volunteered private data to both US and Chinese governments, and Google was the only company to stand up to both, yet the media kept insisting that Google was the evil party for eventually caving into Chinese law. Google gives money to the Summer of Code project, volunteers tons of code, and also doesn't have a monopoly in their market.
Google hasn't thrown chairs, hasn't threatened to destroy anyone, and doesn't have leaked evidence like the Halloween documents, proving their evil.
Where exactly are the comparisons valid?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Hotmail - try moving your email. You can easily forward your Gmail, and now they are opening up POP and IMAP support, which in turn is freeing you from the ads and web-based service, while still providing you the mail for free.
iGoogle - you suggest migrating an OS is easier that a portal? There are tons of portal pages, and they all support rss feeds. Now you're just trolling. Migrating an OS is no easy task. Changing your home page takes all of 30 seconds.
AdSense - There are alternatives to put ads on your page. Google doesn't even dominate the web advertising market.
Calender - Doesn't Google Calendar use the iCal standard, and can't it easily be imported into other programs?
You are either trolling, or have no clue what you're talking about.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
How many generic "Is Google Evil?" articles are we going to get on Slashdot? I've yet to see one that produces anything newsworthy. They all just make general suggestions that Google is the new evil empire. Not only are these articles devoid of any meat and flawed, they are dupes. Please don't repeat them.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
When the hell did we start trusting companies that purposefully screw us to the 10th degree and try to hide it more than we trust a company that is very open about what they do and go to extreme efforts to make the public happy? Google is, in no way, shape, or form evil. What's happened is, many of the major corporations are saying "oh shit, people are going to start expecting google-like service from us and that's really going to screw up our bottom line". In fact, I feel like there are funded, multi-corporation, organized, Google-FUD campaigns out there that put all this garbage into people's heads.
.0005 compared to the things other US companies do. Yet we somehow turn a blind eye to them and get up in arms about Google?
A company that has rendered my computer useless many times because of a false WGA positive? That's evil. A company that injects false TCP flags into sessions to "shape" bandwidth? That's evil. A company that renders a 600 dollar phone useless because I installed a 3rd party program? That's evil.
In fact, the only thing I can recall that google has done ever even remotely evil is a censored version of google search in China. That was a VERY calculated move and they were very open about the decision. Google has actually expressed regret for not standing up for what is right. But this PALES in comparison to the crap other US companies have pulled in China. This includes border-line slave labor and the turning over of information that has led to the death of many innocent people. On the evilness scale, what google did in China was like a
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Google is *NOT* a search company, they are an advertising company. In particular a targeted advertising company. Everything they do - search, maps, email, etc - is just a means to collect data on you in order to build a profile. That profile is then used to enable clients to provide you with a targeted ad when you visit the client's website.
In targeted online advertising, and perhaps online advertising in general, Google is the 800 pound Gorilla. They are not quite Microsoft yet, but they are not that far off in online advertising. They are still consolidating, they are on a curve like Microsoft's, just at a far earlier stage.
Nah, I think his original statement more accurately conveyed what he meant.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Fuck, that's like saying slavery was a temporary social imbalance, but "the market works" so we should have waited until slavery was 'naturally' socially unacceptable, or nobody needed cotton & tobacco anymore.
Lets just overlook the whole damned problem because in time it will iron itself out? Fuck you.
Abusive monopolies deserve to be cut to pieces, PERIOD. There are no monopolies in the long run, regardless of how slow government is to react OK, listen. Monopolies aren't the problem. It's when a monopoly BECOMES a problem, that WE have a problem. Give it time, and the entire sphere of influence will return to its roots in shared resources. All we need is the bandwidth. Jesus, some companies might not WANT that to ever happen, ya think? You don't suppose they might use the power they have TODAY to restrict where the market goes in the FUTURE? We'll be waiting until they either give up, or technological progress changes the market place. Just pray to God a monopoly doesn't get big enough to be able to stifle innovation too, or we'll never get there. Oh, ohhh shit, that's what happened. Just bend over while Microsoft figures out what the future of your OS will be and hope a competitor decides to go for market share instead of high margins.
I don't know anything about the free411 thing. That might be "Evil" if it is how Cringely suggests. But with no details, it's hard to speculate.
The adSense complaining is in no way an indicator of a Microsoft-like monopoly. Google must balance the interests of users, content-providers, and advertisers. Subsets of all three groups are trying to game Google for their own benefit. Of those three groups, Google seems to be most leery of offending the users -- and this has worked well for them.
The user, really, is in control here. The user could use another search. They could put ads.google.com (or whatever) in their hosts.txt file (like many have done to doubleclick and others). Even for those who can't/won't do that, users can avoid pages they know have ads that are more annoying than the content is good (Otherwise I would read Dilbert every day -- but not with popup-blocker avoiding popunders.) Further, since the other two groups are trying to game google to get the attention of users, Google acts as a kind of spam filter for the user, only giving them ads that they can manage -- or even ignore. (Thus Google's limits on the number ads per page, etc.)
The content provider wants, simply, to make money. They have content -- which drives page hits -- and want to monetize that. They have some tension with Google over caches and summaries, but Google can make that up to them by increasing their traffic (for free, when the user searches) and maybe by providing money, if they use Google ads.
Advertisers are the loudest complainers, especially those who have chosen to base their business mostly on Google's referals. They also try the hardest to game Google, to get more users. This group seems to think that since they are the ones paying Google, that they're the only customers of Google, and that Google must treat them better than the other two groups. This is also the only group from whose perspective the 'monopoly' claims begin to make sense. If an online business wants traffic, they pretty much have to deal with Google, since Google "controls" so much traffic. Clearly, some of them resent Google for this lack of choice.
The content providers could choose someone other than Google to support their pages, and the users could opt out of google ads if they wanted. But the advertisers are stuck with google. This might allow google to abuse the advertisers if they wanted. I haven't seen them going that far, though. But they are willing to tweak their algorythems in ways that that sometimes hurt advertisers. I don't think it's intentionally "Evil", but the consequences are hard to foresee. (On the other hand, I've never seen google ads screw up a page's layout, much less infect a user's computer with spyware or worse.) I think that Google would love to be completely fair to these customers, but that's "hard," especially since many of these users are trying to be Evil to Google and the other two groups.
Anyway -- this is one way free markets work. The users and content providers have chosen the terms on which they'll deal with advertisers. If you don't like Google, you'll have to come up with something that's more attractive to those groups, in order to compete.
The comparison to Microsoft is there, but pretty weak. Microsoft does have to address the interests of users, 3rd party developers, and hardware manufactures. Microsoft uses its domanance in its OS and office products to keep all three groups locked in to each other and themselves. Microsoft does seem to favor developers over the other two, but only if the developers will lock themselves into the Microsoft-way of doing things (eg, Microsoft APIs instead of portable code.) This locks users in (if the software they want runs only on Windows), which in turn gives MSFT more clout when ordering hardware vendors around. Microsoft lock-in of some users puts pressure on others to do the same (what else do you do when someone sends you a Word2007 or Visio document that needs to be edi
The premise of this post seems to be that each company has to be an "X" company, where X is a single noun. If Google is an advertising company, it can therefore logically not be a search company.
Adherence to this view forces you to claim that the company dominating internet search worldwide is in fact not a search company!
If your premises forces you to believe in crazy things, it's time to check your premises. In my world Google is both a search and an advertising company, and several other things as well. It's a little more complex to think this way, but with some practice most people can manage quite well with such a complex world view!
1) Google continually tries to improve its algorithms to deliver an improved experience, rather than sitting on its laurels.
2) Sometimes the change in algorithms has negative consequences for some websites.
3) Some websites are living so close to the edge that one month of Google putting their ads in less optimal places costs them so much money it drives them out of business in a single month.
4) It's not the fault of the marginal businesses who don't have the sense to set daily and monthly expenditure limits they could afford, or who have made themselves so dependent on Google that one month of suboptimal ad placement sinks them. It's Google's fault for trying to improve its algorithms.
5) Therefore, Google is Microsoftian in its evil.